[mythtv-users] "Cell Microprocessor Simultaneously Decoding 48
MPEG-2 Streams"
Michael T. Dean
mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Mon May 2 22:48:59 UTC 2005
David Wood wrote:
> Please correct me if I have this wrong: the changes in cell are more
> than just skin deep - more, even, than just adding multiple functional
> units and interconnects. I think it's appropriate to say that cell
> represents a kind of philosophical shift.
Exactly!
> There are some readable background papers out now, for instance:
>
> http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2379
and
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1.ars
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-2.ars
>
> As an example, the cell approach to caching is radically different.
And so much more. They basically threw out all of the conventional
wisdom about creating processors and started from a clean slate. When
confronted with dogma (i.e. all modern CPU's must support "out-of-order"
instruction processing), they asked why--and in many cases did the exact
opposite (all 9 cores support only in-order execution). Their sole
purpose was to create a processor that is ideally suited to highly
parallel computing tasks (i.e. graphics processing, physics
processing--the two key components of gaming--etc.) and cheap to produce.
Mike
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